by Frank Wynne
Hand in hand, my girlfriend and I were able to squeeze between the legs of the people crowding in front of the dead man’s house, to a place not far from the door. Here were numerous children who had come, like us, to taste the excitement that accompanies death. We did not move from our places until a big fist, Khazna’s fist, pushed us all aside as she stood, filling the door with her great, broad frame. In a matter of seconds she had assumed an emotional face, unraveled her two braids of hair, extracted from her pocket a black headband that she tied around her forehead, and let out a cry so terrible that I could feel my heart contract. Khazna pushed her way through the women crowded into the room to a corner where a jug of liquid indigo stood. She daubed her hands and face with the indigo till her face was so streaked with blue it looked like one of the masks salesmen hung up in their shops during feast days. Then she took her place at the dead man’s head, let out another piercing cry, and began to beat her breast violently. From her tongue rolled out rhythmic phrases that the women repeated after her, and tears began to flow from their eyes. It seemed as though Khazna was not just lamenting that one dead man, our neighbor, but, rather, was weeping for all of the town’s dead, arousing in one woman anguish over a lost husband and in another sorrow over a dead son or departed brother.
Soon one could no longer tell which of the women was the dead man’s wife or sister. If the keening women paused a moment in fatigue, Khazna would revive their sorrow with a special mournful chant, following it with another terrible cry. The tears would gush forth once more, the sobbing would become more intense, the sounds of anguish greater. And in this room of grief, Khazna was the center, with a tongue that did not tire and a voice like an owl, a large woman with an uncanny ability to affect sorrow. If one could say that reward is given in exchange for the amount of effort expended, then only a sum so large as to move in Khazna this seemingly inexhaustible store of anguish could compensate her for this tremendous performance of sorrow.
I still remember Khazna when the men came to carry the dead body to its wooden coffin. She stood beside the deceased, begging the pallbearers to be gentle with the dear one, to have mercy on him and not be too quick to cut his ties with this world. One of the men, fed up with Khazna’s chatter, finally pushed her away so that he and his companions could lift the body. Black scarves were waved in farewell, and the women’s exhortations poured forth, this one charging the dead man to greet her husband in the other world, that one asking him to speak to her mother there. Khazna proceeded to fill the neighborhood with shrieks so loud they could be heard above all the other cries.
Once the men had left the house, the procession of mourners made its way slowly down our street, bearing the coffin upon which the fez of the departed one bounced up and down. Then it was time for the women to rest a little from the grief they had imposed on themselves, and they were invited to eat at a table set in one of the inside rooms. Khazna was the first to wash her face, roll up her sleeves, and stuff her big mouth with as much food as her hand could reach. But I also noticed that she was careful to secrete some extra food in her bosom. If she felt that someone noticed her doing this, she would smile wearily and say, “It’s just a bit for my daughter, Mas‘ouda … I got the news of death before I had time to fix her something to eat. And, of course, eating the food of the wake is an act pleasing to God.”
That day I realized that Khazna was not a woman like other women and that she was almost more necessary for the ritual of death than the deceased. I never forgot her big mouth, her dreadful grip, her wild flowing hair. Whenever I heard of a death, I would head for the house of the deceased with my girlfriend, propelled by my curiosity, my desire for sensation, my search for something I could tell my mother about if she herself were not there. The sight of Khazna herself would divert me from the face of the deceased. I would find my eyes riveted on her person, watching her hands as they moved from her breast to her face to her head. Those blows, together with the dirges and chants, seemed to have a special rhythm, a rhythm designed to intensify the pain of the family’s loss and instill anguish in the visitors at the wake.
Some time passed before I had the opportunity to see the other face of Khazna—as she appeared in her role as mashta, or beautician for the brides. There at the wedding she was—the same black hair but now combed back and adorned with flowers, the same ugly face but made up so it scarcely resembled that mourning face streaked with indigo. Outlined with kohl, her eyes seemed much larger. Her wrists wore heavy bracelets (who said the trade of death was not profitable?), and her mouth would open in loud laughter and only half close again, while she chewed a huge piece of gum between her yellow teeth.
That day I began to understand that Khazna had as special a place with brides as she had with the dead. Her task began the morning of the wedding day when she would appear in order to remove the bride’s unwanted hair with a thick sugar syrup. She would pencil the bride’s eyebrows while conveying in whispers (or what she thought were whispers) the sexual obligations to come. If the girl’s face reddened in embarrassment, Khazna would first laugh mockingly and then reassure her that two or three nights would be enough to make an expert of any bride. She, Khazna, would guarantee this, she insisted, provided the bride used a perfumed soap and a cream hair lotion (which she could, of course, buy from Khazna herself).
In the evening the women would come dressed up and perfumed, wearing flowers in their hair or on their shoulders, to hover round the bride on her dais. Then Khazna’s ululations would rip the sky over our town.
Khazna performed memorably on the dance floor, circling constantly while she joked with the women, using words so rude they provoked laughter. And when, amidst the winks of the guests, the bridegroom would come to take his bride, Khazna would conduct the couple ceremoniously to the door of the bridal chamber, for she had the right to watch over them. At that time I did not really understand why Khazna took such care to stand at the door of the bridal chamber, waiting for something, in curiosity and nervousness. But as soon as a sign was given, a knock at the door and the showing of a bloodied handkerchief, would let out a memorable ululation for which the bridegroom’s family had apparently been waiting.
When the men heard that ululation of Khazna’s, they would twirl their moustaches. The women would rise together. In a single movement and from every direction or corner would emerge a ululation of pride and exultation. Khazna would then depart, content, her pocket full, followed by expressions of good wishes on all sides that she would see a happy wedding day for her daughter.
Mas‘ouda’s happy wedding day was something to which Khazna looked forward and for which she put away bracelets and other treasures. For she had no one else to inherit all she had collected from the town’s wakes and weddings.
But heaven decreed that Khazna should not have her happiness. That summer the germs of typhoid fever took it upon themselves to create a season of death for Khazna unlike any other season in memory. I will not forget that summer. The sun would not rise without another death in the town. It was said that in one day alone Khazna lamented three clients.
The typhoid fever did not miss Mas‘ouda, and death had no pity; it chose her despite Khazna’s pleas.
One morning the town woke up to the news of the death of Khazna’s little one, and people’s curiosity was aroused almost at the same moment the wretched child’s life ended.
How would Khazna grieve for her daughter … would it be in a manner unknown to ordinary mourning occasions? What chants and dirges would she recite in her own bereavement? Would it be a wake that would turn the whole neighborhood upside down?
I could not overcome my own curiosity and my pity for Khazna’s loss, so I went to her, I sought her, as did crowds of other women who went to repay some of their own debt to her over the years.
Her single room was small. About twenty people sat, and the rest hovered near the door. I did not hear Khazna’s voice and searched for her, looking across the tops of peoples’ heads. To my surprise, she w
as not crying. She sat on the floor in a corner of the room, grim and silent. She had not bound her head with a black scarf nor smeared her face with indigo. She did not beat her breast nor tear her dress. She sat there not moving, not making a sound.
For the first time I found myself seeing a Khazna who was not affecting emotion. I was looking at the face of a women in such pain she seemed about to die from that pain. Her sorrow was mute, her suffering that of those who feel deep loss, who experience total bereavement.
A few of the women tried to weep, to cry out, but she looked at them in such a stunned way, as though rejecting their demonstrations of grief, that they gradually fell silent, astonished and indignant.
When the men came to take away the only creature who had ever given her the opportunity to express her emotions honestly, Khazna did not cry out or tear her dress. She simply looked at the pallbearers with dazed eyes and, like one lost, followed them down the street toward the mosque. At the cemetery she laid her head down on the fresh earth that housed the little body of Mas‘ouda, and she rested on the grave for many hours. Only God knows exactly how long she stayed there.
People returned from the wake saying many things about Khazna. Some said she had become so mad she appeared to be rational; some said she had no tears left after a lifetime of wakes; and of course someone said that Khazna did not cry because she was not given any money.
A few, a very few chose to say nothing, letting Khazna in her silence say everything.
THE EYES OF THE STATUE
Camara Laye
Translated from the French by Una MacLean
Camara Laye (1928–1980). An African writer born in French Guinea (now the République de Guinée). He studied in Conakry, the colonial capital, and moved to France at the age of nineteen to study engineering. Here he penned two of the earliest and most influential works in Francophone African literature, The African Child and The Radiance of the King. He returned to Guinea after its independence and held various posts in government, but conflicts with President Ahmed Sékou Touré and a brief incarceration forced him into exile. From 1964 until his death, Laye lived in Senegal, where he worked as a research fellow in Islamic studies at the University of Dakar.
She stopped walking for a moment – ever since she had set out, she had been feeling as though she had earned a moment’s rest – and she took stock of her surroundings. From the top of the hill on which she stood, she saw spread out before her a great expanse of country.
Far away in the distance was a town, or rather the remains of a town, for there was no trace of movement to be seen near it, none of the signs of activity that would suggest the presence of a town. Perhaps it was merely distance that hid from her sight all the comings and goings, and possibly once within the town, she would be borne along on the urgent flood of activity. Perhaps …
‘From this distance anything is possible,’ she was surprised to hear herself say aloud.
She mused on how, from such a vast distance, it seemed still as though anything could happen, and she fervently believed that if any changes were to take place, they would occur in the intervals when the town was hidden by the trees and undergrowth.
There had been many of these intervals and they were nearly always such very long intervals, so long that it was now by no means certain that she was approaching the town by the most direct route, for there was absolutely nothing to guide her and she had to struggle continually against the intertwining branches and tangled thorns and pick her way around a maze of swamps. She had tried very hard to cross the swamps, but all she had succeeded in doing was getting her shoes and the hem of her skirt soaking wet and she had been obliged to retrace her steps hurriedly, so treacherous was the surface of the ground.
She couldn’t really see the town and she wasn’t going straight towards it except for the rare moments when she topped a rise. There the ground was sparsely planted with broom and heath and she was far above the thickly wooded depths of the valleys. But no sooner had she finished scrambling up the hills than she had to plunge once more into the bushes and try to force her way through the impenetrable undergrowth where everything was in her way, cutting off her view and making her walk painful and dangerous again.
Perhaps I really ought to go back, she said to herself, and certainly that would have been the most sensible thing to do. But in fact she didn’t slacken her pace in the least, as though something away over there was calling to her, as though the distant town were calling. But how could an empty town summon her? A silent, deserted town!
For the closer she came to it, the more she felt that it must really be a deserted city, a ruined city in fact. The height of the bushes and the dense tangled undergrowth about her feet convinced her. If the town had still been inhabited, even by a few people, its surroundings would never have fallen into the confusion through which she had been wandering for hours; surely she would have found, instead of this tangled jungle, the orderly outskirts of which other towns could boast. But here there were neither roads nor paths; everything betokened disorder and decay.
Yet once more she wondered whatever forced her to continue her walk, but she could find no reply. She was following an irresistible urge. She would have been hard put to it to say how this impulse had arisen or indeed to decide just how long she had been obeying it. And perhaps it was the case that if only she followed the impulse for long enough, she would no longer be capable of defying it, although there was no denying that it was grossly irrational. At any rate the urge must have been there for a very long time, as she could tell from the tiredness of her limbs and moreover it was still very dose. Couldn’t she feel it brimming up within her, pressing on her breast with each eager breath she drew? Then all of a sudden she realized that she was face to face with it.
‘The urge is me,’ she cried.
She proclaimed it defiantly, but without knowing what she was defying, and triumphantly, although unaware of her opponent. Whom had she defied, and what could she be triumphing over? It was not simply that she was identifying herself with the strange compulsion in order to get to know more of it and of herself. She was obliged to admit that the urge was indefinable, as her own being for ever escaped definition.
After one final struggle with the branches and obstacles, and after skirting one more morass, she suddenly emerged in front of the city, or what remained of it. It was really only the traces of a town, no more than the traces, and in fact just what she had feared to find ever since she set out, but so sad, so desolate, she could never have imagined such desolation. Scarcely anything but rough heaps of walls remained. The porticoes were crumbling and most of the roofs had collapsed; only a column here or a fragment of a wall there proclaimed the former splendour of the peristyles. As for the remaining buildings, they seemed to waver uncertainly, as though on the very point of tumbling. Trees had thrust their branches through broken windows; great tufts of weeds pushed the blocks and the marble slabs upwards; the statues had fallen from their niches; all was ruined and burst asunder.
I wonder why these remains seem so different from the forests and bush I have come through already? she said to herself. There was no difference except for the desolation and loss, rendered all the more poignant by the contrast with what had once been. What am I searching for here? she asked herself once more. I ought never to have come.
‘Many people used to come here once,’ said an old man who appeared out of the ruins.
‘Many people?’ she said. ‘I have not seen a single soul.’
‘Nobody has been here for a very long time,’ said the old man. ‘But there was a time when crowds of people visited the ruins. Is that what you have come for?’
‘I was coming towards the city.’
‘It certainly was a great city once, but you have arrived too late. Surely you must have been delayed on the road.’
‘I should not have been so late but for my battles with the trees and undergrowth and all my detours around the swamps. If only they hadn’t held me back
…’
‘You should have come by the direct route.’
‘The direct route?’ she exclaimed. ‘You cannot have any idea of the wilderness round this place.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I do have some idea of it. As a matter of fact when I saw that people had stopped coming, I guessed how it was. Perhaps there isn’t any road left?’
‘There isn’t even a bush path!’
‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘It was such a fine town, the most beautiful city in all the continent.’
‘And now what is it?’ she said.
‘What is it?’ he replied dismally.
With his stick he began to mow down the nettles that rose thick and menacing about them.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
She saw, in the midst of the nettles, a fallen statue, green with moss, a humiliated statue. It cast upon her a dead, grey glance. Presently she became aware that the look was not really dead, only blind, as the eyes were without pupils, and it was in fact a living gaze, as alive as a look could be. A cry came from it, an appealing cry. Was the statue bewailing its loneliness and neglect? The lips drooped pitiably.
‘Who is it?’ she asked.
‘He was the ruler who lived in this place. His rooms can still be seen.’
‘Why don’t you set up the statue over there?’ she said. ‘It would be better there than among all these nettles,’
‘That is what I wanted to do. As soon as the statue fell from its alcove I wanted to put it back, but I simply hadn’t the strength. These stone sculptures are terribly heavy.’
‘I know,’ she replied, ‘and after all it is merely a stone sculpture.’
But was it merely carved stone? Could sculptured stone have cast upon her such a piercing glance? Perhaps, then, it wasn’t mere stone. And even if it were nothing more than mere stone, the fact remained that for all the nettles and moss and the vagaries of fortune that it had endured, this stone would still outlast man’s life. No, it could not be mere stone. And with this sort of distress in its look, this cry of distress …